15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Perception of Lost Contrast

Marion Jaeger

University of Konstanz, Germany

Psycholinguistic research in speech recognition and lexical representation has focused upon regressive Place assimilation across word-boundaries to explain how listeners use spectral information to disambiguate neutralized phonetic information contained in the acoustic signal. The favored paradigms are gating and phoneme identification experiments. This paper presents experimental and statistical data derived from a large German corpus of spontaneous speech that suggest listeners interpret segments with respect to their position within a syllable, the phonetic cues contained in the region of maximum spectral transition, as well as phonological constraints of the language.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Jaeger, Marion (2003): "Perception of lost contrast", In ICPhS-15, 1735-1738.